Podcasting as Storycrafting and Translational Health Communication Scholarship.

Defining Moments is a podcast that extends the reach of articles published in Health Communication into public acoustic realms. In this essay, we locate Defining Moments in the broader realm of podcasting and highlight its inception, production, distribution, and impact through available data analytics. We approach podcasting as a relational experience in which meaning-making extends beyond any audio text to include reactions, interactions, and actions. Across three seasons and thirty-five episodes, the podcast has created space for scholars to translate research for general audiences and reflect on defining moments of their personal and professional lives, often situated in adverse experiences or unjust social contexts. Common to all episodes are stories of retrospective sensemaking in the service of prospective change.

"Putting Therapy in My Own Hands": Cottage Industry Employment and the Healing Potential of Collaborative Making.

The integration of art therapy in medicine is expanding as are calls to strengthen its evidence base of clinical outcomes. In this essay, we elevate the voices of non-clinically based artists who work in community and home settings. Although we do not discount the value of art therapy, we add nuance and complexity to clinical and society narratives about art and health by bringing into focus experiential intent and outcome as well as context to explore the meaning-making capacity of the arts. We argue: (1) aesthetic experiences can foster self-expression, relational development, and employment beyond medically identified goals and treatment plans; and, (2) Equating community-based art programming with art therapy oversimplifies our understanding of art and health and does a disservice to both.

Moving toward Narrative Competence and Inclusive Healthcare through the Open Book Project.

This essay offers a layered account of the origins and enactment of a narrative medicine program at the Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine titled the Open Book Project (OBP). Narrative medicine positions clinical judgment as involving both scientific and narrative reasoning, a set of practices particularly well-suited to fostering inclusive health care and social justice. The OBP involved first-year medical students who met bi-monthly to witness, reflect on, and write about literary passages, visual images, music and lyrics, and other works of art. Sessions also provided opportunities for participants to attentively listen and respond to others, opening themselves to diverse ways of knowing and being. The authors move between academic literature, participants' compositions developed during the project, and students' testimonies to illustrate the dividends and difficulties of narrative medicine.

DooR to DooR's Acoustics of Care: Interrupting and Transforming the Biomedical Landscapes of Western Hospitals.

The present study was conducted at the University of North Carolina Hospitals. Data were collected from DooR to DooR (D2D), a healing arts program that brings professional artists into the hospital. Drawing from ethnographic data, we forefront music in health communication literature by exploring its performance by D2D artists in hospital settings that range from in-patient oncology wards, waiting rooms, and even burn units. From a narrative theoretical approach, we situate art programming in the historical development of the contemporary hospital system in the U.S. and our analysis amidst growing bodies of literature on the narrative and aesthetic potentials of healthcare. We offer an in-depth analysis of how D2D's music disrupts the soundscape of UNC hospitals, distracts patients from troubling exigencies, and fosters self-expression and storytelling among participants.

Defining Moments Telling Stories to Foster Well-being, Humanize Healthcare, and Advocate for Change.

Health Communication launched the "Defining Moments" forum in 2009 to showcase the social and material power of storytelling. On its 10-year anniversary, we take stock of how authors have enacted "Defining Moments" including what was narrated, by whom, and why. In eight loosely coupled thematic clusters, we revisit the more than 75 published essays to date, finding value in ways that speak to the emerging and enduring issues of concern for health communication scholars. Across the essays, the maturation of health narrative theorizing is revealed by the sheer scope of topics addressed, coupled with the expanded voices and ways of voicing experience. Collectively, these essays have enlarged academic conventions and offered diverse entry points for refiguring the experience of illness and well-being.

Storytelling in Acoustic Spaces: Podcasting as Embodied and Engaged Scholarship.

Health Communication launched the "Defining Moments" feature of the journal in 2009, including essays that showcase the social and material power of storytelling. Over the past 10 years, essays have enlarged academic conventions and offered diverse entry points for refiguring the experience of living well in the midst of inescapable illness, trauma, and disability. Health Communication builds on this legacy by introducing a podcast by the same name. In this essay, I position podcasting as embodied and engaged scholarship that connects health communication scholars, physicians and other care providers, patients and families, and general publics interested in illness and healthcare, vulnerability and well-being.

Narrative constructions of health care issues and policies: the case of President Clinton's apology-by-proxy for the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (TSE) has shaped African Americans' views of the American health care system, contributing to a reluctance to participate in biomedical research and a suspicion of the medical system. This essay examines public discourses surrounding President Clinton's attempt to restore African Americans' trust by apologizing for the TSE. Through a narrative reading, we illustrate the failure of this text as an attempt to reconcile the United States Public Health Service and the African American public. We conclude by noting the limitations of rhetoric when equal prominence is not given to policy proposals in national apologies.

In conversation: high school students talk to students about tobacco use and prevention strategies.

The purpose of this multi-site qualitative study is to explore how adolescents talk about tobacco use. Sixty-six students in four high schools became co-researchers and led focus group interviews with 205 fellow students. From the interviews, the authors develop a story line that reports how adolescents begin smoking, how smoking becomes a pervasive influence, how attitudes form about smoking, what it means to be a smoker, and, ultimately, student suggestions for tobacco use prevention. Embedded within this story line are complex questions and contradictions. We explore whether peers really are influential, if the media is important, whether smoking is a matter of personal choice, if schools actually promote tobacco use, and whether adolescents can quit smoking.